From 35Mm to 1080P: Film, HDTV, and Image Quality in American Television
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Luke Stadel From 35mm to 1080p: Film, HDTV, and Image Quality in American Television Abstract This essay explores the way technical literature on HDTV during the 1980s and 1990s functioned as a theory of television. In contrast to a long tradition of media theory in which television’s image was seen as inferior, especially in comparison to film, television researchers and technicians reversed this notion by conceiving of HDTV as the new standard of perfection in visual representation. Despite the fact that HDTV would not gain widespread acceptance during this period, these early experiments laid the foundation for the environment of media convergence around the television set that would emerge in later decades. In 1993, Cablevision, the leading trade publication compression to increase programming volume of the cable industry, ran a feature story asking, “Is rather than signal quality, despite the fact that the hi-def dead?” The article goes on to speculate: industry had championed HDTV as the future of cable for nearly a decade. Echoing this sentiment, Has cable made high definition television one commentator likened HDTV to another obsolete, even before the technology famously failed American technology, dubbing it reaches consumers? HDTV, long the “Edsel of the consumer electronics industry.”2 heralded as the cornerstone of television’s Because of the eventual success that HDTV has future, was expected to revive the nation’s found in the early decades of the twenty-first standing in the consumer electronics century, it is tempting to dismiss such statements industry, restore its once faltering as quaintly out of touch with the inevitability microprocessing business and prove that of technological progress in electronic media, a the United States still had the ability process driven solely by the relentless engines of to develop innovative technology. But consumer capitalism. Even in 1993, most experts in a world of unlimited programming quoted in Cablevision tended to agree that the selections, carried in digital streams of prohibitively high cost of HD sets was preventing 0’s and 1’s to bigger and better NTSC the technology from proliferating widely, and that television sets, is there still a demand for HD would eventually find its place in the American the more expensive HDTV picture? With televisual landscape. This prediction has seemingly cable now on its way toward providing been borne out in recent years, especially following digital compression, do consumers want the HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war of 2006-2008, or need HDTV?1 which brought HDTV into the mainstream of the world of consumer electronics. This passage refers specifically to the then-recent While market economics are important to decision of the cable industry to use digital the history of technology, such explanations offer “F” is for Failure 31 James Crawford and Mike Dillon, editors, Spectator 32:1 (Spring 2012): 31-36. FROM 35MM TO 1080P too neat a summary of the complex process of John Ellis would continue to assert that television decision-making as to how new technologies gain as a medium was defined by its low quality image widespread acceptance. The proposed adoption and and the distracted mode of viewing this image eventual rejection of HDTV in the late 1980s and encouraged.5 early 1990s represented a complex jurisdictional These essentialist definitions of television have conflict, in which the electronics industry, national been criticized most notably by John Caldwell, who governments, broadcasters, cable operators, argues that the rise of videographic technology regulators, and consumers all had competing and more sophisticated approaches to television stakes. Existing histories have given an overview production led to a radical break between older of HD’s role in the shifting television environment and newer modes of television style during the of the period, yet little work has been done to 1980s.6 However, because it is concerned primarily illuminate discourses surrounding HDTV during with dominant practices in the broadcast industry, the period when the technology remained largely Caldwell’s model does not account for marginal a part of the cultural imaginary. In focusing on technologies like HDTV. Although HDTV was HDTV’s later success, contemporary scholarship developed out of the same ethos as these practices, has essentially ignored the technology’s initial it was never integrated into the mainstream of failure.3 This narrative of failure is more than a television production, primarily due to the way historical curiosity, as debates over the quality of the split between broadcast and cable complicated the televisual image during the late 1980s and the adoption of a new American standard for early 1990s would help lay the foundation for image quality to be shared across both industries. the environment of convergence that currently The division between broadcast and cable made dominates American media industries. HDTV it clear that cable lacked a singular ontology, called into question long-held notions of the making the adoption of new technologies a much aesthetic inferiority of the televisual image in more complicated process than it had been under comparison to the filmic image. As television the three-network oligopoly that dominated became the preferred viewing site for Hollywood television’s early decades. Much in the way that films, due to the rise of cable television and home early television was originally conceived of as video, technicians reimagined television as the site “radio with pictures,” television during the 1980s of an image that was not inferior to theatrical film was now being redefined by a combination exhibition, but rather superior to it. of new technologies, new audiences, and new To begin, HDTV must be considered relative programming sources, especially contemporary to the historical tradition of television theory, Hollywood films that were the bread and butter of which has long figured a low-quality image as a cable systems. central aspect of television’s ontology. The oldest As Caldwell notes, the meanings of new and most influential of such theories is Marshal technologies are often theorized, whether McLuhan’s definition of television as a “hot” explicitly or implicitly, by the practitioners medium. Following from his well known axiom responsible for creating television programming.7 that “the medium is the message,” he argued that However, existing histories of early experiments “the TV image is one of ‘low-definition,’ in the with HDTV have glossed over the levels of sense that it offers little detail and a low degree basic television research and creative practice of information . a TV close-up provides only as in favor of emphasizing the role of corporations much information as a small section of a long-shot and government agencies in the proliferation of on the movie screen.”4 In this way, the television new technologies of televisual transmission and aesthetic is defined as the inverse of cinema’s total reception. Media historian Hernán Galperin asserts and complete representation of reality, a pervasive that the development of HDTV was part of the notion in classical film theory from Andre Bazin to larger trend of the digitization of television in the Christian Metz. McLuhan’s ideas about television 1970s and 1980s, both in the UK and in America, would go largely unchallenged in subsequent which was the product of policymakers responding decades, as theorists like Raymond Williams and to a changing media landscape characterized by 32 SPRING 2012 STADEL “the steady decline of the American and European this model, the meanings of technology can only consumer electronics sector, the international be understood by a focus on the “multiple ledgers” diffusion of the information revolution agenda, of competing discursive paradigms, rather than a and the spectrum shortage created by the rapid focus on the “single ledger” of the eventual winner growth of mobile telephony and other wireless or dominant interest.11 In the remainder of this telecommunications services.”8 Joel Brinkley’s essay, I offer an outline of the meanings of television history of HDTV uses a similar focalization produced by the researchers working to develop to Galperin’s, emphasizing major decisions by HDTV technologies. Although these technologies corporate and national political interests. Brinkley grew out of a similar set of cultural and economic offers a breezy account of the digital transition, in imperatives as Caldwell’s notion of televisuality, which he asserts that their meanings were originally negotiated through explicit debates in technical literature rather than The creation of digital, high-definition through production activities. Technical literature television is an American triumph, no published in The Journal of the Society of Motion question … the high-definition television Picture and Television Engineers (JSMPTE) offers race did spawn exceptional creative genius. a window onto a new theory of television, one at But it also a pointed up with astonishing odds with historically dominant conceptions of the clarity how willing government leaders medium. Television technicians and researchers are to use American business for their represent an important user group, and their own opportunistic ends—promoting it at interests broaden the discourse of HDTV beyond one moment, betraying it at the next.9 the political domain into discussions of aesthetics and spectatorship, how the transition to digital Thus, while Brinkley and Galperin produce television and HDTV were expected to influence slightly different narratives, they essentially offer actual television viewers. the same view of the development of HDTV, one While political decisions are not completely that I argue is too limited to offer a historically separate from the discussions taking place in adequate conception of both the period itself as JSMPTE, a study of articles published from the well as the prehistory of the current moment of period reveals that a significant proportion of the the widespread adoption of HDTV by American articles were dedicated to the aesthetics of HDTV.